[Animation] Fennekin

Blog's been a little slow over the past week for two reasons. First being that Jack, Will and I have been working on a group job through the uni, which took a big chunk out of last week, and secondly, Pokemon Y came out. As a huge Pokemon fan, I wanted to enjoy my weekend on this game, and now that it's complete, I decided to do a small loop of Fennekin. I went for a lower frame rate on this one as I thought it gave it a nicer feel with the flowing motion.

[Animation] Gaming channel opening

I made an opening for a gaming channel on YouTube over two days. This was a good test for working with a more simplistic style, as well as adapting other characters into different builds. I also put attention into the colour, using filters to set the overall tone of the shot.

[Animation] Unicornius

I made a silly video with YouTuber "Oliver Age 24" featuring his character Unicornius. I animated this in a day and it was a fun break from solid frame by frame drawing, made me remember the fun side of animation!

[Animation] Gaming WIP

A small work in progress GIF for a gaming channel opening I'm working on. We agreed on a simpler, "chibi" style for this opening, which is a nice change of pace and allows me to get some practice in more cartoony expressions.

[Animation] "Hermit" test

I did a quick animation test to see how the character works for my uni final, I needed to get used to the joins, so I tried him shirtless. I may make some changes to the character before the final film. Below is the first character sheet I made, showing the different stages of the character's production, as well as some expression tests.

[Update] Future of Clayos

As those of you who follow my work will have noticed by now, releases on my own personal animations, such as Oddball have pretty much ground to a halt over the last year, so I'm making this entry to put things to rest, explaining my plans for everything I'm involved in. I'll cut to the chase and get straight to Oddball.

Since starting the series before University, I've learned a lot of new things, and a lot of things I did poorly over the course of the "show", whether these be in drawing or writing, most of the show feels heavily flawed or dated to me now, as well as being poorly suited for what I want to get out of animation (namely the animation side of things, rather than the writing/production) To carry on and finish the canon episodes (chapters four to eight) would be a pretty poor use of my time, and an even worse showcase for what I want to bring to potential employers. As such, I'm putting the show on the shelf, I may pick it up later in some form, whether it be animated, or something simpler like a comic, but for the time being, the canon series is being laid aside to make room for better, and more worthwhile productions. I may make the occasional short, as Antique still stands as one of my favourite creations, and I hope to release Chapter 4 in some form so as not to disappoint the voice actors and people who have contributed, but after that point, everything falls into limbo. Hopefully people can understand and respect the decision, it's taken a fair amount of time to realize that I've been stressing over things while my heart just isn't in the project any more.

Moving swiftly onwards to Vampire Pixel. I'm again going to be straight to the point when I say I do want to complete this animation (and yes, it's a one off). Due to the format, a fair few people have come to the assumption that this was intended to be a series, but through my second year of Uni and after failing to complete the animation in time, I learned a few mistakes I made, and hope to apply those to future work. As I said, I do plan to finish this animation once I get time, but I'd rather this be something I sit and plow through than a spare time project I half-ass. I only ask people be patient while I put my time and effort into other projects over this uni year!

So with those two projects aside, I think I can safely go onto one of the big reasons I'm restructuring. As previously mentioned, my big goal for this work is employment, and I'd specifically like to work as an animator, I'm not the best when it comes to writing, nor do I have the biggest interest in it for the most part, but what I would like to do is get experience working in a variety of situations and animate for some different projects. A lot of my personal projects felt the same, and until recently I had the worst case of "same-face" syndrome ever in my drawings. To mix things up, I want to try working with a bunch of different creatives online, this is not only useful for work's sake, but it's also building me a very satisfying network of creative friends, as well as enabling me to work with some people I really respect. To put things simply, I'm branching out to add some variety to my work, as well as taking up some paid opportunities to help support myself while at University.

Shelving a few projects also gives me a lot more much needed time to create my final piece for University, which is arguably the most important animation I will ever make. After a crushing disappointment with Vampire Pixel, I'm going to do everything I can to avoid the same thing happening again. I can't say a huge amount about my project, as it's still in very early pre-production, but what I can say is that I hope to keep it short, achievable, yet effective. Until then, I hope people are ok with the changes in plans, and I hope people stand by for the new Kreid!